I’m a Snopesophile. Snopes, for those unfortunate few who don’t know, is a website dedicated to urban legends, email chains, and other ephemera than can be identified as apocryphal or true. When I first found out about it, I would stay up nights digging through their horror page, finding totally over the top, but nonetheless unnerving grotesqueries. It’s a fantastic collection of silliness, but they also tend to do a commendable job of discovering hoaxes and, occasionally, analyzing their spread.
I don’t visit the site nearly as much anymore, but I am subscribed to their twitter feed and occasionally check out the Internet scuttlebutt. Unfortunately, as can be seen on their Top 25 page a lot of the circulating rumors tends towards the boring side. Most of the popular pages on Snopes are dedicated to ridiculous terrorist warnings, virus alerts, questionable home remedies and, unfortunately, Islamophobia. But one of the incredibly persistent rumors on that Top 25 list, one that’s consistently been there since I first started going to the site, is the warning that someone is making a gay Jesus movie.
If you read that link, you’ll see that people have had their panties in a bunch over a nonexistent gay Jesus film for about thirty years. People are obsessed with it. The number of calls and letters that have been sent out protesting a gay Jesus movie is astonishing to me. Indeed, it makes me start to wonder if people actually want a gay Jesus movie…
It’s actually pretty amazing that the world is still without a gay Jesus movie. Seeing as how popular the rumor is, and given that Hollywood has released movies that have themes that are just as sacrilegious (The DaVinci Code comes to mind), I just can’t believe that the idea of a gay Jesus movie has never come up before. Surely, someone, somewhere has said, “Fuck it! I’m making a gay Jesus movie.”
Granted, Snopes points out two pictures that have sort of skirted the actualization of a gay Jesus movie: the gay porn Him, and the play Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi, aside from the fact that it’s a play, is probably the closest real life analogue to the rumor, but according to this write-up it’s not particularly good, nor is it really particularly blasphemous. To me it sounds like another attempt at modernizing the Christ story, which isn’t really that revolutionary. Him would probably ruffle more feathers, except for two reasons: a) it’s a porn and b) it hardly exists.
Since it’s a porn it kind of suppresses itself. Porn is so prevalent, and there’s so damn much of it, that it’s kind of hard for anything to stand out. Plus, it’s kind of its own subculture, and if anyone that actually cared about sacrilege they’d have to (excuse the pun) penetrate the porn bubble and find it in the first place. Once they did so, they’d probably have some explaining to do as to why they were watching gay porn in the first place. It seems a little contradictory to say, “Hey guys! I was at the porn store looking at gay porn and guess what I discovered right next to Anal Fisting Faggots 8. A porn with Jesus having sex with other guys! Needless to say, I was shocked… Shocked!”
And the other problem with porn is, it’s so ephemeral. Which is why no one really cared about Him when it came out, and why Him isn’t really available anymore. Apparently, for a long time, people didn’t even think it existed. This blog post does an excellent job of tracing its obscurity.
However, after reading about it, it kind of seems that Him doesn’t really even fit the bill of a gay Jesus movie, either. First of all, again, it’s a porn and porn never really puts a lot of effort into plot. Secondly, from what I can gather from the scant evidence available, the plot, such as it is, mostly centers on a kid who lusts after Jesus. So he talks to a priest about it; who then masturbates. Whatever. The Village Voice review on that page points out that Christ doesn’t even show up until 3/4s of the way through the film… in front of the Pan Am building, and then he’s crucified on a stop sign in SoHo. And then, presumably, there’s some more sex. Wait a minute… this sounds much more like the kid is fantasizing about having sex with Christ, rather than Jesus actually being gay.
So, seriously, someone needs to just go ahead and make all the protesters’ dreams come true. Dear World, let’s make a gay Jesus movie. Let’s a have a big historical gay Jesus epic. Let’s show Jesus as the iconoclast he really was: subverting Jewish law, pissing of the Pharisees, healing people on the Sabbath, and, most importantly lying with another man.
If a gay Jesus movie is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
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